OLEMA is a contemporary circus performance exploring and attuning itself to the experience of connection and the undoing of anthropocentrism.
The piece takes its inspiration from the story of an extinct bird, whose solitary song ends in silence. On the stage, acrobatics, dance, music and visual art meld together. The performance asks, what is left after a loss, and if what has been lost can still be found in the body, voice, and movement.
Circus offers a singular context for this inquiry: its history is entwined with the thresholds between the human and the more-than-human – from the serpent-like contortionists (käärmeihminen, ‘snake-human’ in Finnish), to beast tamers, and legacies of bodily dehumanisation.
The dramaturgical core of the work grows from the extinction story of the Kauaʻi ʻōʻō bird species. The last male of the species continued to sing its duet-form mating call even after the last female had disappeared in a hurricane in 1982. In the 1987 recording by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, heard during the performance, ever-lengthening silences open within the song – spaces for another voice to enter, a voice that no longer answers.
On stage, the circus artists move at the thresholds of acrobatics, dance, balance, and a corporeality that reaches toward the more-than-human. The electroacoustic music brings forth the pulse of the living and the finality of extinction. The work of costume designer introduces surfaces that meet and resist movement: friction and glide, gloss and opacity, the edges of beings. Lighting and set design conjures a stage world in which the forms, movements, reflections, illusions, materials, and shadows of the surrounding world become figures in their own right within the weave of the performance.
The multidisciplinary elements intertwine on stage into a question: what remains after loss, and can that which has irreversibly ended be carried in a living body, gaze, voice, and movement?
Direction and dramaturgy: working group
On stage: Aino Savolainen, Ella Jaakkola and Felicia Hedman
Contemporary circus choreography: Aino Savolainen and Felicia Hedman
Composition, music, and sound design: Ella Jaakkola
Lights and set design: Saana Volanen
Costume design: Riina Leea Nieminen
Material research and sewing: Jenni Räsänen
Creative support: Henna Kaikula and Anni Koskinen
Conveners: Aino Savolainen and Ghia Lumia
Production: Ain Savolainen, Ghia Lumia and Ella Jaakkola
In support: Kone Foundation, Arts Promotion Centre Finland (Taike), SKR, Cirko – Center for New Circus, CircusNext, Subtopia, Soiva Metsä Festival, Dance Theatre Hurjaruuth, R.E.D. Arena Norway, Cornell University
Performance language: wordless; non-language-specific
Age recommendation: 14 years old and up
Performance duration: 60 min
